From the Avalanche to the Game: White-Collar Offenders on Crime, Bonds and Morality
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From the Avalanche to the Game: White-Collar Offenders on Crime, Bonds and Morality Joost H. R. van Onna 1,2 # The Author(s) 2020
Abstract In order to understand the mechanisms that underlie involvement in white-collar crime on a personal level, 26 offenders convicted of a white-collar offence were interviewed. Building on theory and research from white-collar criminology, life-course criminology and moral psychology, findings show that a combination of criminogenic circumstances, weakened social bonds and adjusted moral ideas lead offenders down different pathways into white-collar offending. Although the process of crime involvement seems highly context-dependent in some instances, the interviews indicate that crime involvement is more commonly part of a long-running process, in which social bonds have weakened or moral ideas have been adjusted, which in turn influenced the decision to engage in the white-collar offence. Along with the limitations of the study and the directions for future research, the paper discusses the implications of the findings for white-collar crime research, in particular the complex role of morality in white-collar crime involvement. Keywords White-collar crime . Social bonds . Morality . Life-course . Interview
Introduction The role of personal experiences and moral views of those who become involved in white-collar crimes, such as tax evasion, insider trading or embezzlement, remains poorly understood.1 Do individuals become criminally active in response to a specific 1
In this study an offence-based definition of white-collar crime is adopted (following Edelhertz’s definition, [1]), to reflect the heterogeneous nature of white-collar crime in contemporary societies (see also: [2]). Still, the large majority of this study’s respondents would also fall within an offender-based approach, as they committed the white-collar offences during their occupation in high-trust positions in organization ([3]; see method section).
* Joost H. R. van Onna [email protected]
1
Department of Criminal Law and Criminology of VU University, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
2
Netherlands National Public Prosecutor’s Office for Serious Fraud, Environmental Crime and Asset Confiscation, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
van Onna J.H.R.
situation, or is their crime involvement part of a long-running process? And what are the social and moral mechanisms that account for this process? In white-collar crime literature, the involvement in white-collar crime is typically conceptualized as the outcome of differential exposure to criminogenic situational forces, such as corporate cultural values and businesses’ practices (e.g. [3–5]), organizational opportunity structures (e.g. [6]) or economic strains (e.g. [7]). While these situational forces are highly important for understanding crime involvement, white-collar scholars stress that without taking offenders’ background and cognitions into account we cannot fully understand how offenders react to or perceive criminogenic environments, why individuals become attracted
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